The government of the United States has conducted an investigation on COVID-19, its origins and on the effectiveness of responses taken to the pandemic.
You can read it here: https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-select-concludes-2-year-investigation-issues-500-page-final-report-on-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward/
They have a nice short summary to take a look at. I did read it and a few things came up as strange to me. The wording is a bit propagandistic and they indicate that the most likely hypothesis is that the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan and then accidentally infected some researchers.
I found these findings extremely interesting as they are different from other articles I had read before.
I skimmed through the first 100 pages, which is where the origin of COVID is discussed. Out of these, only 4 pages discuss the fact that the virus was made in a lab, while the remaining ones discuss the fact that the article proposing that the virus likely originated in an animal and was later transferred to humans.
The evidence they use to sustain that the virus was made in a laboratory is the following:
- some researchers in Wuhan got sick with a respiratory disease before COVID
- the FBI is confident that the virus was made in a laboratory
- Boris Johnson said he believes the virus was made in a laboratory
- no animal carrying a similar disease was found
Now, these look like good leads to me; but the only real thing that may actually prove anything is that the FBI is certain of it. However they don't say why the FBI believes the virus was made in a laboratory. I'm not sure whether this is classified information or how they justify this belief as it's not explained anywhere.
The following part goes into the analysis of how a certain article was published. They conducted extensive investigations interviewing people involved and reading through their emails and messages. There appears to be some small academic misconduct in the process which took there, but really nothing to justify their thesis.
I don't know, I'm a bit startled: it took them two years to conduct extensive investigations and this is all the evidence they can come up with? Moreover, the conclusions of their report are nowhere justified in any way which could support their high confidence.
I took a closer look at the second part, the conclusions of the report are the following.
PROXIMAL ORIGIN PUBLICATION: “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.
Yes, closing quotation marks are missing in the original too, you would imagine they'd format their documents better, but then again the whole report is terribly formatted. They didn't even bother to copy emails as text and just pasted around the images.
It is really funny how all evidence they provide to support this claim actually appears to disprove it completely.
Because from the available evidence what we can clearly see is the following:
1. Fauci did not prompt the authors to write the article
2. Fauci did not take part in the writing of the article
3. Fauci asked the authors to analyze the Lab Leak theory if they deemed it viable and publish any results which supported it
Here, have a page of the document to evaluate how well it was drafted. No, on this page none of the text is selectable. To be fair, they did pretty good: on some other pages there is some selectable text...
